Saturday, September 19, 2015

Macroscopically quantum coherent fluid dynamics at criticality?

Evidence for the hierarchy of Planck constants implying macroscopic quantum coherence in quantum critical systems is rapidly accumulating. Also people having the courage to refer to TGD in their articles are gradually emerging. The most recent fluid dynamics experiment providing this kind of evidence is performed by Yves Couder and Emmanuel Fort (see for instance the article Single particle diffraction in macroscopic scale). Mathematician John W. M. Bush has commented these findings in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences and the article provides references to a series of papers by Couder and collaborators.

The system studied consist of a tray containing water at a surface, which is oscillating. The intensity of vibration is just below the critical value inducing so called Faraday waves at the surface of water. Although the water surface is calm, water droplet begins to bounce and generates waves propagating along the water surface - "walkers". Walkers behave like classical particles at Bohr orbits. As they pass through a pair of slits they behave they choose random slit but several experiments produce interference pattern. Walkers exhibit an effect analogous to quantum tunneling and even the analogs of quantum mechanical bound states of walkers realized as circular orbits emerge as the water tray rotates!

The proposed interpretation of the findings is in terms of Bohm's theory. Personally I find it very difficult to believe in this since Bohm's theory has profound mathematical difficulties. Bohm's theory was inspired by Einstein's belief on classical determinism and the idea that quantum non-determinism is not actual but reduces to the presence of hidden variables. Unfortunately, this idea led to no progress.

TGD is analogous to Bohm's theory in that classical theory is exact but quantum theory is now only an exact classical correlate: there is no attempt to eliminate quantum non-determinism. Quantum jumps are between superpositions of entire classical time evolutions rather than their time=constant snapshots: this solves the basic paradox of Copenhagen interpretation. A more refined formulation is in terms of zero energy ontology, which in turn forces to generalize quantum measurement theory to a theory of consciousness.

Macroscopic quantum coherence associated with the behavior of droplets bouncing on the surface of water is suggested by the experiments. For instance, quantum measurement theory seems to apply to the behavior of single droplet as it passes through slit. In TGD the prerequisite for macroscopic quantum coherence would be quantum criticality at which large heff=n×h is possible. There indeed is an external oscillation of the tray containing water with an amplitude just below the criticality for the generation of Faraday waves at the surface of water. Quantum classical correspondence states that the quantum behavior should have a classical correlate. The basic structure of classical TGD is that of hydrodynamics in the sense that dynamics reduces to conservation laws plus conditions expressing the vanishing of an infinite number of so called super-symplectic charges - the conditions guarantee strong form of holography and express quantum criticality. The generic solution of classical field equations could reduce to Frobenius integrability conditions guaranteing that the conserved isometry currents are integrable and thus define global coordinates varying along the flow lines.

One should be of course very cautious. For ordinary Schrödinger equation the system is closed. Now the system is open. This is not a problem if the only function of external vibration is to induce quantum criticality. The experiment brings in mind the old vision of Frölich about external vibrations as induced of what looks like quantum coherence. In TGD framework this coherence would be forced coherence at the level of visible matter but the oscillation itself would correspond to genuine macroscopic quantum coherence and large value of heff. A standard example are penduli, which gradually start to oscillate in unisono in presence of weak synchronizing signal. In brain neurons would start to oscillator synchronously by the presence of dark photons with large heff.

0 Comments:

About Me

I am a Finnish theoretical physicist. For last 37 years Topological Geometrodynamics has been both the passion and mission of my life. TGD is a noble attempt to construct a theory of everything, not forgetting consciousness. I have four children, who have brought a lot of happiness to my life. I live in Hanko, a small seaside town in southern Finland. I love almost all kinds of music but if I had to give just one name I would have difficulties in deciding between Chopin and Beethoven.

The 37 years with TGD have produced an enormous amount of material covering basic
TGD as a mathematical theory, the applications of TGD ranging from Planck length scale
to cosmology, and TGD inspired theory of consciousness and of living matter as a macroscopic
quantum system. I have organized this material at my homepage as online books and articles.